in case people are not aware, ESRI is a 90's style monopoly of subscription desktop software that has built itself an empire in California. The ESRI Washington DC research lead recently testified that "with generative AI maybe people wont be needing lots of QGIS subscriptions" (edit that is the direct quote on video) since AI can repeat ordinary GIS workflows. ymmv
ArcGIS also has an online edition that doesn't need any desktop software, which is highly capable and costs nothing for individuals, no matter how much data you throw into it.
It is. Canada is covered in forests that sit on very thick layers of peat. Thanks to climate change we've entered a death spiral where the climate dries out the peat enough to make it flammable and once it catches fire, the heat further dries it out which makes deeper peat flammable the next season. The layer is at least a few meters deep and up to tens of meters deep in some places so the fires can even burn underground between seasons, leading to neverending wildfires.
Russia is facing the same problem with their peat and sooner or later, the strip from Washington to Montana will face it too.
And of course, peat is a fossil fuel (a precursor to coal), and burning it releases CO2. So this wildfire cycle is the equivalent of strip-mining all the Canadian peat deposits and involuntarily burning them, which further increases CO2 levels, which further raises global temperatures, which exposes even more feedback loops.
This is why the IPCC was targeting 1.5C as a limit beyond which any further anthropogenic climate change needed to be avoided. At that point, natural feedback cycles kick in, which make it very difficult to halt climate change (regardless of what humans do) before hitting 4-5C in warming.
Yep! Peat is estimated to be the biggest organic carbon sink on the entire planet. If all of it burns, it'll more than double our CO2 concentration to over 1,000 ppm at which point all bets are off.
The Times has had regular summer wildfire coverage on the West Coast for as long as I can remember. All the same, it shouldn’t be that surprising that an East Coast paper puts out a headline for an unusual condition on the East Coast. What’s the beef?
It wasn't just the NYT, it was almost all mainstream media blowing up about it when the east coast got a little smoke. The pics honestly didnt even look so bad compared to what I've been through the past 7 or so years. It seemed like it wasn't really news worthy until New Yorkers coughed a little more than usual.
The Times is writing for an audience that includes East Coasters, meaning that an ordinary occurrence in your life on the West Coast will be treated as unusual on the East Coast.
(This is true in the general case: the newspaper doesn’t know what you or anyone else has been through; your responsibility as a reader is to infer whether you’re the intended audience, or whether the audience is people who haven’t had the same experience as you.)
there has been nothing like the 2017 Tubbs fire smoke covering San Fancisco in living memory.. you are right but nothing in California is "normal" in the current era
